← Self-Conscious with Chrissy Teigen
Self-Conscious with Chrissy Teigen
Daniel Coyle: How to Flourish - Finding Meaning, Connection, and Aliveness in Everyday Life
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- [00:03]
Chrissy Teigen
You're listening to Self Conscious with Chrissy Teigen, an Audible original podcast. Join me as we explore the cutting edge of health, wellness and personal growth with the world's leading experts and thinkers. From inspiring stories to actionable insights, our conversations aim to help you lead a healthier, happier and more productive life. We're living in a moment where everyone is overwhelmed, overextended, and somehow still. So many of us feel an ache we can't name. It's that quiet sense that life is happening around us, not through us, that we're doing everything right and still missing something essential. We're productive, but not necessarily alive. Daniel Coyle wanted to understand that gap, and his new book called Flourish is his attempt to figure out why certain places, relationships and communities feel vibrant and meaningful, and why others leave us drained or quietly lonely. What he discovers is that Flourish flourishing isn't happiness or success or even calm. It's something deeper, joyful, meaningful growth shared with others. Not something we stumble into by accident, but something we build moment by moment through presence, ritual, attention, and genuine connection. And the hopeful part is this flourishing isn't grand or mystical. It happens in the tiny everyday moves that widen our attention and bring us closer to one another. The pauses, the small courtesies, the messy projects, the conversations where we actually listen. Today we talk about why flourishing matters right now, why modern life makes it so hard to access, and the simple practices that can bring more meaning, more connection, and more aliveness into the lives we're already living. Daniel Coyle, welcome to Self Conscious. Thank you so much for being here today. This is again, really exciting for me.
- [02:07]
Daniel Coyle
And thank you for all your work you do. You're on the right side of things and it's just great to see the energy and connection and fun you bring to it.
- [02:14]
Chrissy Teigen
So thank you. I'm really trying these days and I think that's why your book really stood out to me. It feels so important right now. What motivated you to write this book?
- [02:27]
Daniel Coyle
I was in a tough spot. Both my parents passed away unexpectedly and it happens to everybody. It's garden variety life life stuff. But it knocked me out, made me feel really empty. I felt like, you know, that treadmill of modern life. You just feel like it moves faster and you're not going anywhere. And I tried all the usual stuff like, oh, I should meditate or I should go talk to some smart people, and none of it really worked. And then I bumped into this quote from this guy, Barry Schwartz, psychologist, a couple lines, but it just said, people think life is a Treasure hunt. But it's not, it's a treasure creation. And it's like, oh, so my journalist brain just goes, what? That got me thinking about meaning and joy and fulfillment. And most of it got me thinking, who does that and how do they do it? And as a journalist is the only thing I knew what to do was to grab a notebook and hit the road and go to these places and find places that were just incredibly generative communities of meaning and joy and fulfillment and see what they do and see how they do it.
- [03:29]
Chrissy Teigen
What do you actually mean by the word flourish?
- [03:32]
Daniel Coyle
It's joyful, meaningful growth, shared. It's a word that doesn't come out of the world of physics or machines. It comes out of the world of nature. Things that flourish are growing, they're connected, they have roots and there's meaning and connection there. And so that's the scientific definition of flourishing, joyful, meaningful growth that's shared. And one way to connect to it in our own lives is to just wonder, when was the last time you felt super connected in a vibrant community? It's about frequency. It's not about having some life changing, Grand Canyon meaningful moment with someone. It's, wait a minute, did you have 20 little cool interactions today where you just said, hey, I see you, you see me, we're talking about whatever, it doesn't matter. The substance doesn't matter. What matters is the frequency of the interactions. That is just such a powerful thing. So the question becomes, how do we bump that up? How do we increase that? And it's a great reminder to all of us because we sometimes think leadership is about, I need to give them all a plan. If I'm going to lead my kids, I need to give them a plan for Thanksgiving dinner and tell them exactly what to do. No, that's, that's not how we're built. It's much better to say, hey, we're having Thanksgiving dinner. Here's a list of all the stuff that has to get done. Do you guys want to take part? Okay, great. Sign up for whatever you want to sign up for. Let's do it together. That level of autonomy, we forget how powerful that is. And that's what I saw in all the places that I visited. They all acted like it's more like pickup basketball than it is. We're executing some play, everybody's moving where they want to move, doing what they want to do, taking a role with the whole group. And that feels really, really good. And it creates a lot of growth because you allow people to step up and do things that maybe they weren't ready to do, but when they do them, that's how we grow.
- [05:12]
Chrissy Teigen
Can you describe what flourishing actually looks like in a normal, everyday moment? Something that one of our listeners would recognize.
- [05:20]
Daniel Coyle
Flourishing looks like there's sort of an inhale and an exhale. It's like a pulse. It's a moment of meaning and then a moment of action. It could take a variety of forms, but it's two people connecting, realizing they have a connection, and then trying something together, taking a step into uncertainty. You know, whether that's a kid trying something he's never tried before because he got a little word of encouragement, or that he saw someone do something, and now he's trying to mimic that. That is a form of growth, natural growth. What is absent is coercion. What is absent is someone saying, you need to do this. I'm gonna force you to do this. It's a natural feeling. And the feeling you get these places is they're these little moments of pauses, inhales, where you're noticing something special, like, oh, man, feel that music. Look at that dancing. Look at that interaction. And then there's some expressive action and that combination of pauses of meaning and then expressive action. If you look at a flock of birds moving through a forest, altogether, they're navigating this together. They're in tune. There's something musical about that. And there's something musical about moments of flourishing, too, because people are connecting to energy and then activating that energy. It could happen if you were in a therapy session. All of a sudden you got this great insight, and then you walked out. And because of that insight, you said hello to the person next to you on the bus. That's flourishing. You're taking meaning. It's not logical. You're not following someone's plan. You're inhaling meaning and you're exhaling action. And you're changed as a result.
- [06:55]
Chrissy Teigen
So is that stuff so fun and exciting? Because so much of our day now is so calculated down to the minute.
- [07:00]
Daniel Coyle
Exactly right. And good businesses, good places are fig. That's what I saw. I visited this place called Zingerman's. Have you ever been there? It's in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They started as this tiny, tiny deli, one room. They're a $90 million community of businesses. And they got there by disobeying every modern management rule in history. Walt Disney came to them and saying, hey, we'll give you $50 million to come into the park. Like, you guys are a great Great deli. They said, no, thanks. We're in Ann Arbor. This is what we get, our meeting. This is where we work. I went to an orientation there, and the CEO spent the whole time and asking the new employees about their story. Where'd you come from? How'd you get here? They're about creating meaningful connection. They're not about trying to tell people exactly what to do at any given time. They've got another technique that's really cool called visioning, where they project themselves into the future. Like, what do we want our deli to be in 5 years? 20 minutes? You spend 20 minutes writing down what you think it might be. Don't think, just write down. And in each of these things, they're creating this sense of connection and freedom. They're letting people go their own way and do what they want to do under this umbrella of meaning. They started with this vision of the best Reuben. And when you bit into it, the juice would run down your arm. That was the vision.
- [08:11]
Chrissy Teigen
What is it about people that love living in that space?
- [08:16]
Daniel Coyle
When I went to those places, I kind of thought they'd be like these tidy places that had all the answers, you know, like, oh, we're flourishing, Everything's great. In fact, they were kind of messy. They were constantly experimenting. They were trying stuff and failing. They were very fluid and alive and flexible and creat. But they weren't the answer people. They were more like the question people. There was a time once when I was at Zingerman's and I asked the CEO, I said, how come you guys said no to Walt Disney? That was a $50 million offer. Why did you say no to them? And he responded by asking me a question. He pointed to my wedding ring and he said, do you take every opportunity that comes along? Oh, that makes me see scaling in a different light. I don't know that scaling is always great. There's a difference between growing for growth's sake and developing. And what these places at flourishing were doing were developing deeper and deeper roots in relationships where they were not just trying to mindlessly grow where we are now, though.
- [09:16]
Chrissy Teigen
Do you think that somebody could start out with a business and be able to say no to opportunities like that?
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Daniel Coyle
I do. I absolutely do. Yeah, I absolutely do. There's a bakery in my neighborhood.
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Chrissy Teigen
It gives me hope.
- [09:26]
Daniel Coyle
Yeah, you don't need to sell to strangers. I think the word scale, we've accepted it as universally always, always, always good. And it's sometimes good. I guess with a lot of digital stuff, it's probably Good. But when it comes to actually having relationships in a community that you're taking care of, that you're serving, it's really possible to have, I think, a good life and not have to be continually growing. As Ari Weinsweig, who's the CEO of Zingerman's, he says, eternal growth is the model of the cancer cell. So, you know, makes me think of it a little bit differently.
- [09:58]
Chrissy Teigen
Yes, you tell the story of the yearly Homer, Alaska. We are from Homer, Alaska. Nutcracker Ballet. Why does that messy handmade community project capture flourishing so perfectly?
- [10:16]
Daniel Coyle
I grew up in Alaska, and when I got to thinking about writing about flourishing, I asked myself the question, where have I seen it most vividly? And the answer was immediate. It's like, let's put on a huge ballet. Like, let's make a 20 foot tall tree that's mechanical and let's make a giant clock. And let's train all these kids, fishermen, kids, you know, it's like an end of the road town of 3,000 people. Our bumper sticker says, a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem. So this is not Broadway, but the idea was audacious. Audacious. Say, wait, let's train up. Let's do it. It's not magic. Let's figure it out. And so 150 tutus and 40 years later, it is this magnificent performance that a bunch of parents volunteer to build and sew costumes. It's incredible. And you can see in every moment of the rehearsal where these kids are syncing up to the music and learning. And then they're looking at a kid. There may be a lamb and another kid is a prince. And the lamb is looking up at the prince thinking, oh, I can be a prince someday. And the prince is looking back at the lamb saying, I used to be a lamb. Flourishing is about an ecosystem. It's not a machine. We think about so many things in our lives as a machine. My body and my habits and my career. And I'm going to push this button and flip this lever and I'm going to go from A to B to C to D. But man, if you're dealing with a living thing, and this Nutcracker is a living thing, it's a set of relationships that are made by meaningful connection, by a thousand little hellos and by a thousand little failures and a thousand little attempts and by the presence of like, we're trying to build something kind of beautiful together. I think that process is at the core because it's really what community is. We're Sharing these gifts. We're trying something audacious. We're not looking for someone to come along and save us. We're gonna do it.
- [12:08]
Chrissy Teigen
Tell me it's still going on.
- [12:09]
Daniel Coyle
Oh, you bet. Yeah. Just. Was last weekend. Oh, yeah, of course.
- [12:12]
Chrissy Teigen
Awesome.
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Daniel Coyle
No, it's massive.
- [12:14]
Chrissy Teigen
So then what happened in the messiness of it?
- [12:17]
Daniel Coyle
It's amateurs trying for two or three or four performances to elevate the game. And so you've got someone fell through a trapdoor one year. And at the same time, there's some exquisite dancers. Some d have come out of our little town and actually danced on Broadway and actually become great ballerinas. Everyone's trying to grow. And growth is always awkward. Growth is always filled with experiments and failure and imperfection. And imperfection isn't like a downside. Imperfection is actually a sign that you're doing it right. You know, community. You're always going to have imperfection and you're always going to have surprise. You're going to have some performance. And you've been around music and performance enough to know that, like, sometimes somebody comes out there and just knocks everybody over. You didn't think they had it in them, but they do. And you see that all the time.
- [13:10]
Chrissy Teigen
Okay, so tell us about Vorstad, the Dutch neighborhood that came alive when one person planted just a tiny garden.
- [13:18]
Daniel Coyle
Yeah, it was such a cool story. This neighborhood kind of was pretty dead economically down. It's very two story structures. It's in Holland. There's brick streets, brick sidewalks, brick buildings. Everything's red brick, gridded. And there were these two dudes who sat out in front of their stoop every day in lawn chairs and they smoked and they were kind of handyman sort of. There was Patrick and Lane dirt. And one day they just got fed up with how bleak everything was. And Patrick went in, he got a shovel, and he wedged the shovel into the sidewalk and pried out one of the paving stones and then pried out another and another and another. And then he set them on their edge and guided a little dirt and brought in some flowers and plunked them down. And they called it a street garden. And the neighborhoods, first of all, they're like, wait, those guys did what? But then the neighbors were like, could you do one for me? And pretty soon they had a dozen. Then they got anointed the street garden academy president and co president. And with this title, they went and showed about a hundred other people how to do it. And pretty soon this neighborhood gets transformed. Then Patrick sees somebody knitting and he goes, well, you guys should do a knitting club. Because this other woman knits and this other person knits and this other person knits. And pretty soon there's a knitting club and they're doing a six mile long scarf, wrapping it around the street. And then they did a playground. And then there was a house that refugees were staying at. And some other neighborhoods nearby were rejecting the refugees. Vorstad was saying, no, bring them here. And then they wrapped the house in a scarf to say, what better way to welcome than to knit a scarf knitted by your new neighbors. And so this neighborhood came to life. And what's interesting is no plan, no planner, nobody divided up and said, okay, here's the agenda for Monday. Here's how many street gardens will do. No, it was group flow. That's the phenomenon. Group flow is when you have autonomy, a sense of belonging and a sense of ownership and you're moving toward a horizon. And that horizon in this case was sort of like Homer making the Nutcracker. We want to make our neighborhood prettier together. And that type of ownership is what I saw in every single place I went where it was never about a leader. I want everybody to do X, Y and Z. It was more like somebody pointing at something beautiful, pointing towards some horizon that was aspirational. And then having a messy, messy. The mess is not a disadvantage. It's actually essential. A messy self organizing process where people are like, hey, what do you want to do? I'll do that. You do this, let's go this direction together. And that's like how we're built to accomplish things as a community. That's what community feels like and looks like. And it's not something that is predictable or measurable or planned, but it's an energy that emerges when the conditions are right. Those conditions of autonomy and ownership and a clear horizon.
- [16:08]
Chrissy Teigen
I wish more people lived with that fearlessness in their town. And nothing has any character anymore. So I specifically loved hearing this story of this little town because everything has lost kitsch and fun.
- [16:19]
Daniel Coyle
I know, it's true, right? Everything feels the same. It's all perfectly efficient. But whenever you have anything so efficient and certain and it loses hoa, loses its vitality every, all of it. The lesson for that is when you step into uncertainty together, you create this energy and these bonds. We often think we've gotta trust each other before we can be vulnerable. And that's actually backwards. Moments of shared vulnerability. When those guys bright up those bricks and those neighbors said, do that for me too, they're sharing that vulnerability together. They're not saying, well, we better report these guys to the local council. No, they stepped into it. And when you step into uncertainty together, that's when you create that trust. You don't have to wait for trust. You have to step into that together. And that's what defines those communities. And the other thing you have all the time when you have community is annoyance. Community is annoying. Sometimes annoyance is the price of community. And these days, we're kind of allergic to annoyance. We're very sensitive. I think sometimes we're dialed a little too tightly on that stuff, that if we welcome annoyance as being like, you know what, that's what community's about. We're all human beings. But to actually take that leap and say, I'm going to get in there and see what happens, see what it feels like, I'm going to get some surprise, I'm going to get some annoyance, but I'm going to get growth. Don't treat your life as a game to win, but as a garden to grow. So having that, those gardening moments is kind of what this stuff's all about.
- [17:40]
Chrissy Teigen
There's people that I couldn't stomach being around before, and now I see how unique and special they are. I didn't know if it was all the ketamine treatments coming together or something, like a switch just flipped. And it has changed my world in the way that I don't allow for that to bring me down anymore. So it's interesting that you bring up that community can be very annoying because I find, like, beauty in it now.
- [18:05]
Daniel Coyle
It's really interesting. I love that. And what you're talking about is that attentional shift. When you have that narrow beam attention going on, you're noticing the problems. You're seeing where they're lacking. You're judging, you're categorizing them. And when you let go of that, it is like flipping a switch. Because literally it is flipping a switch. You literally are paying attention in a completely different way. We normally look at those moments and we think, ooh, magical moment. It's not magic. It's your attention system. You are being really attentionally healthy in that moment. Because we normally go through life with this task, attention. So the idea that you took that leap and thought, what the heck, I'm just gonna give it a try, is not magic working. It's actually you're paying attention to the world in a different way.
- [18:45]
Chrissy Teigen
Can you unpack those two types of. Of attention and what they mean?
- [18:50]
Daniel Coyle
There's a guy named Ian McGilchrist, who's really pioneered this. There are two types of attention. One is in each hemisphere of the brain. In your left hemisphere, you've got this really narrow task attention. It's like a spotter beam. It's just focused on the task. Its job is to get stuff done on the other hemisphere. On the right hemisphere, you have this broad, warm attention. Its job is to connect to the world and figure out what's happening and have a relationship. It's relational attention. And so in order to turn on relational attention, you've got to turn off your task attention. You've got to let go. You have to surrender. And the way this evolved is that all our ancestors in evolution had two jobs. One was they had to eat. So they had to focus narrowly and find something and categorize it and grab it quickly, quick, fast, categorical attention. That was very judgy. It's either this or that. Boom, grab it. And the second job. Pay attention to everything. Pay attention to the weather and the wind and your social group. And what's the nuance? What does that eye contact mean? What are my relationships like? And you can only do one at a time. You can't do both. It's impossible to be narrow and broad at the same time. And so evolution gave us one hemisphere for narrow, one hemisphere for broad. And that's how we're built. And so in order to get into the broad, you have to surrender the narrow. In order to get into the narrow, you have to surrender the broad. And there's also all these kinds of crazy experiments. You know, the invisible gorilla experiment. Have you ever seen that one?
- [20:16]
Chrissy Teigen
No.
- [20:16]
Daniel Coyle
So it's a video. It's people passing a basketball, people in white shirts and black shirts. And your job as a viewer is to watch and count how many passes the players wearing white shirts make. And they make 15, 16 passes, and everybody counts them. And then at the end of the experiment, the experimenter says, did anybody notice the gorilla? And 50% of people say, nope. And then you rewind the tape. And while they're passing, a guy in a gorilla suit walks out, pounds his chest in the center of it, gets unmissable, and then he walks off. 50% of people don't see it. And the reason is that focus makes you blind. Focus makes us blind. And so we're walking around trying to solve our attentional crisis, but we don't understand that the basic nutrient of our attentional system is this wide, broad, sustained, warm attention. That is our relational attention system. And our task, our narrow attention is kind of like carbs, and this other is kind of like protein. And so this idea that I think is happening in the flourishing groups is that they're finding ways to rebalance and get into healthy attention, where they're spending a lot of time in that meaningful, connective, pause, receptive stillness where you sense meaning. They're spending time building meaningful relationships because they're able to surrender that task, attention and open up those lanterns, those broader lanterns of warm, sustained attention. And that's why they have meaningful relationships.
- [21:48]
Chrissy Teigen
Why does the world keep us locked in the narrow, stressed out one?
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Daniel Coyle
The short answer is because we have chosen values that are about productivity, about getting things done. There are other ways of living that you could explore. There's other ways of living that have evolved throughout the world. When they study the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, as much happier and more satisfied than we are, they live almost a stone age existence. But we've chosen this lifestyle and we're here. This is the place we've built. So our challenge isn't to go live like the Hadza. We're in this. We have a treadmill that we have to be on, where we have to be a narrow view. We have to be productive at certain points in our lives. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. But the challenge we have is how do we build that on a foundation of meaning. The meaning stuff is the foundation that's more important. If it was a nutrition pyramid, that big, broad attention should be the bottom, and then that narrow task, attention, should be the top. So where are there times in our lives where we can flip it and pause and get curious and create meaning together and build community together and realize that trying to be productive and efficient is exactly the wrong thing to do at 100% of the time. There's a time for it, but it's not 100% of the time.
- [23:05]
Chrissy Teigen
How can someone tell when they're in narrow attention? And what's one quick way to shift into a wider, more relational mode?
- [23:13]
Daniel Coyle
You can tell because you feel really certain. You feel like you are absolutely, positively sure and you're in control. This feeling of having power over something, think about how this evolved. It evolved to help us grab things and control them and manipulate them. So if you feel like you have power over something, that is the tell. Now the way to get out of it is to surrender, let go and open up. Imagine your attention widening a little bit and imagining other stories and possibilities coming in. It feels very strange and vulnerable to do that. One of the people who did it most Powerfully. In the book, I tell the story of the Chilean miners. If you remember Those guys from 2010, if there was a group you never wanted not to trade place with, it'd be those guys like, they're 2,000ft down, it's dark. They have no idea if they're gonna live or die. Probably are pretty sure they're gonna die, actually. And for the first half hour down there, it was like Lord of the Flies. People were eating any food they could find. But then the leader, this guy named Luis Urzua, he stepped up. He was a supervisor. Everybody was a little scared of him. He had a white helmet on, and he walked to the center of the circle. He took off his white helmet, and he said, there are no bosses and no employees anymore. Which blew everybody's mind and knocked them out of this narrow. We need to fix it. I needed all the food. We're going to panic to a question, and the wide attention always feels like a question, which is why it's slightly uncomfortable. But he took off his helmet, and all of a sudden, he widened all their attention. This question of, what would it be like if we all were leaders together? What would it be like if we didn't have a boss? What would it be like if we all were teammates down here? And by asking that question, he performed the ultimate act of leadership, which is to shift everybody's attention to meaning, to something meaningful. So it feels weird and it feels strange. But to your point, when you do it a lot as you reframe, I think every time you reframe, you're doing that, that you're letting go of one explanation for the world. This person is really annoying. And you're opening up and reframing that and saying, well, that might be right, it might not be right. I'm not sure. There could be another story for me to notice here. And I think we do it all the time unconsciously, but it feels like in the end, you're going from this high degree of certainty and control to something that's a relationship with something bigger, and you're noticing something that was already there. That was already there. And that's what's stabilizing about.
- [25:37]
Chrissy Teigen
Are there times for both? There's times for narrow attention and times for wide attention. Or should we be trying to branch ourselves to practicing wider attention all the time?
- [25:46]
Daniel Coyle
You're asking exactly the right question. I think the best thing is to have narrow serve the wide, narrow serve the wide. So you do the wide first. What relationships count here? Walk into a room. What is going on here? What's really mattering now? I want to do something to serve that. I want to add something to these relationships.
- [26:03]
Chrissy Teigen
So say, for example, I'm talking to my son or something and it's bedtime and it's just us one on one. I would think that that was deserving of, like, very narrow attention. How could I make that wider?
- [26:14]
Daniel Coyle
Tell a story about your family's history.
- [26:15]
Chrissy Teigen
Okay.
- [26:16]
Daniel Coyle
Make it connect to some shared meaning. Mention all the names of family members who aren't there. Tell a story about. Stories are so great for this, right?
- [26:25]
Chrissy Teigen
Yeah.
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Daniel Coyle
Stories turn off that narrow tension. They make us say, oh, wow, once upon a time. What? I'm instantly shifted.
- [26:32]
Chrissy Teigen
Oh, I love that. I love that so much more than the mundane. What did you do at school today? They don't give you an answer. What about this? This is due. You have, like, that's all such. I fucking hate small talk, Especially with family. I love that deeper stuff. For someone who feels depleted or maybe a little bit disconnected, what is one small thing they can do tomorrow to spark more meaning?
- [26:58]
Daniel Coyle
The one small thing that they can do tomorrow is to take a second and reflect on where they're feeling meaning in their life.
- [27:06]
Chrissy Teigen
Right.
- [27:06]
Daniel Coyle
Right now. Take out a piece of paper and reflect on the last few days. Where have you felt like the guitar string of yourself? Vibrate a little bit. Where have you felt that? And think about how you might be able to get more of that. If we're trying to get something to be a little bit more active, I would say maybe seek out one small ritual. One small ritual per day, like one moment. Or maybe a better way to say it would be, look for one yellow door tomorrow. Look for one thing that appears out of the corner of your eye and think about stepping through it. You don't have to, but just notice it. Notice that possibility and take a second and pause. All flourishing begins with a pause. Take that pause and think about where it might lead and what it might feel like to step through.
- [27:54]
Chrissy Teigen
I find those yellow doors to be, like, so cool and so fulfilling and so explain the concept for those that haven't read the book.
- [28:01]
Daniel Coyle
Yeah, it's an idea from Columbia University psychologist Lisa Miller, who studies attention and studies the brain and studies when we're narrow and when our attention is broad. And this idea is that we mostly go through life kind of in that narrow mode, looking for greens and reds. Green means go green door. Let's go through it. A red door. I'm not going to go there. But life changes when you look for doors out of the corner of your eye that are neither green nor red, but you can explore. And they don't appear in the center of your vision. They're something that's passing by, like someone on a plane walking by, and you kind of have a moment and you do something that happens every time there's meaning. There's a pause, there's some pause, and there's some space there where you can either step into it or not. It's your choice. But if you step into that yellow door, you're shaping some new future and taking some experiment. And the scariness of it is what gives it connection and energy. And so it's funny. Yellow door. It's funny you'd say that because that's the big thing. That's the main thing that I took away from five years of working on this book, too. There was a night a few years ago where a friend of mine said, do you want to go indoor rock climbing with some friends? And my immediate answer was like, I hate heights. I think indoor rock climbing looks really goofy. And you got the dumb shoes, and absolutely not. But then I stopped, and I was like, yellow door, maybe. So I go. Five years later, these are some of my best friends in the world. We're playing music together. We're going on ski trips. It has slowly evolved. It's changed my life. Say yes to that. And it is really powerful.
- [29:29]
Chrissy Teigen
Well, even in your rock climbing story, you taught me something, because I imagined that you were gonna say, five years later, I'm rock climbing every single day. And it was about more than that, though. It created a group that you found other things to enjoy with throughout the years, too.
- [29:45]
Daniel Coyle
Life is so complex. We think everything's a straight line. It's all these branches and all these pathways that are constantly branching off from each other. And so the other main thing that I've taken away from this, it's all this squiggly path, and you got all kinds of turns and twists, and we really are terrible at predicting the future.
- [30:00]
Chrissy Teigen
Are you also big on doing that thing that scares you, taking that big risk? Do you like a big leap, a big, scary thing?
- [30:07]
Daniel Coyle
I do. I think action is the only way we ultimately learn. I'm a really believer in you can talk about stuff all you want, and you can think about stuff all you want, and you can definitely overthink things. I've done that quite a lot. But whenever it comes down to it, I just get taught that lesson over and over again. That no matter what I think beforehand, doing it actually doing it. The experience is the most powerful teacher on the planet.
- [30:47]
Chrissy Teigen
And now for the tool. Each episode, our guests distill their expertise into practical and actionable insights. Today, Daniel shares his counsel exercise to help us shift into a more connected state.
- [31:00]
Daniel Coyle
Christy? What we're gonna do is called the counsel exercise. And this is an idea from a guy named Gary Weaver. He was a counselor in Utah, and he used to do this with his clients out there. And it's a way to, as you think about the attentional systems that we were talking about before, how you've kind of got that narrow task attention, and then you've also got that w. Warmer relational attention. And it's fun to flip that lantern on a little bit. So here we go. Close your eyes, please, and picture a wooden table. A wooden table. And at that table, I'd like you to invite people, living or deceased, who truly have your best interest in mind, who are truly in your court.
- [31:49]
Chrissy Teigen
Out loud.
- [31:50]
Daniel Coyle
Nope. No, just. Yeah, just picture them coming and taking a seat there.
- [31:54]
Chrissy Teigen
Okay.
- [31:55]
Daniel Coyle
And now invite your highest version of yourself to join them. Picture yourself walking in, pulling out a chair, and sitting down with that group. And now, in your mind, ask them if they love you. And now with everybody there, ask them what right now is important for you to know? What do they need to tell you about your path? And listen to their answer. And you can open your eyes whenever you're ready.
- [32:34]
Chrissy Teigen
I never do stuff like that, except for on this podcast. And it always brings this physical element of sweaty palms and flashing in the darkness, even of my closed eyes, just because it's such a unique feeling for me.
- [32:52]
Daniel Coyle
What did you notice?
- [32:54]
Chrissy Teigen
I noticed me saying things, obviously, that they were telling me that I wanted to hear myself. Of course. Probably take more risks. Go with your gut. If it's not a yes, it's a no. If it's not a hell yes, it's a no. Which is something I've been trying to practice more lately. Live life for me and not everybody else around me.
- [33:20]
Daniel Coyle
Yeah, they call that a council exercise because that's the council that's always with you. Every other group of humans on the history of the planet has spent a lot of time thinking about their ancestors and thinking about the people who are connected to them and thinking about their mentors. And I think a lot of times we let that go. Those people, if they're not in our immediate windshield, we sort of forget. So having a table in your mind that you can gather people from all parts of your life, I mean, some of those People might have been relatives, some of those might be friends, some of the people from childhood, coaches, mentors, whatever. Having a counsel that you can just let go, close your eyes and connect with. For me, it's a beautiful example of the power of relational attention that when you surrender that narrow and you tune in, it can be a real grounding. And it's available all the time. And it takes 30 seconds to do or less. It takes less time as you go. You kind of have those people with you. And so that's been a core thing that I've been practicing too. It feels good to check in every once in a while, especially if you're at a forecast gets away to ground and gets you out of that immediate cause and effect. If I do, I'm in control here. It's like, well, no, you can let go of that.
- [34:25]
Chrissy Teigen
I can tell I'm still such a work in progress because the mere thought of sitting at a table and asking my loved ones people that really care about me a question about myself would bring me to tears.
- [34:38]
Daniel Coyle
Oh, wow.
- [34:38]
Chrissy Teigen
I would probably sob all the way through it, listening to every single one of their answers. That was like the overwhelming feeling of it. But I guess a lot of people think of it as their guardian angel, but they've never really put an actual person to it or people that love them to it.
- [34:53]
Daniel Coyle
So I love that it is powerful.
- [34:56]
Chrissy Teigen
Daniel Coyle, thank you so much for being here today on Self Conscious.
- [35:00]
Daniel Coyle
Thanks for having me. It's been so much fun.
- [35:10]
Chrissy Teigen
Daniel, thank you so much for joining me. Today on Self Conscious. Daniel Coyle's Floor Flourish is available on Audible. Until then, tune in, turn on and feel better. This is Chrissy Teigen and you've been listening to Self Conscious, an Audible original podcast. This has been an Audible original produced by Audible, Q Code and Huntley Productions, hosted by Chrissy Teigen. Written and executive produced by Jimmy Jelinek Executive producers for Q Code, Shen Yun Hu and Alexa Gabrielle Ramirez Executive producer for Huntley Productions Chrissy Teigen Executive producers for Audible, Andy Beckerman and Stacy Creamer Recorded and engineered by Ben Milchev Filmed by Bridger Clements Production coordinator Brian Coulter. Edited, mixed and mastered by Ben Milchev Head of Creative development at Audible, Kate Navin Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza Copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC Sound Recording Copyright 2025 by Audible Originals LLC, LLC.